Label advantage in concept learning

  • Lewis & Long (unpublished)
  • N papers = 18, N experiments = 102, N participants = 1664
  • Infants' categorization judgments in the presence and absence of labels.
  • Curator is Molly Lewis

Althaus, N., & Plunkett, K. (2015). Timing matters: The impact of label synchrony on infant categorisation. Cognition, 139, 1-9.

Balaban, M. T., & Waxman, S. R. (1997). Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants?. Journal of experimental child psychology, 64(1), 3-26.

Booth, A. E., & Waxman, S. (2002). Object names and object functions serve as cues to categories for infants. Developmental psychology, 38(6), 948.

Booth, A. E., & Waxman, S. R. (2003). Mapping words to the world in infancy: Infants' expectations for count nouns and adjectives. Journal of Cognition and Development, 4(3), 357-381.

Deng, W. & Sloutsky, V. M. (2015). Linguistic labels, dynamic visual features, and attention in infant category learning. Journal of experimental child psychology, 134, 62-77.

Ferguson, B., & Waxman, S. R. (2016). What the [beep]? Six-month-olds link novel communicative signals to meaning. Cognition, 146, 185-189.

Ferry, A. L., Hespos, S. J., & Waxman, S. R. (2010). Categorization in 3-and 4-month-old infants: an advantage of words over tones. Child development, 81(2), 472-479.

Ferry, A. L., Hespos, S. J., & Waxman, S. R. (2013). Nonhuman primate vocalizations support categorization in very young human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(38), 15231-15235.

Fulkerson, A. L., & Haaf, R. A. (2003). The influence of labels, non-labeling sounds, and source of auditory input on 9-and 15-month-olds' object categorization. Infancy, 4(3), 349-369.

Fulkerson, A. L., & Haaf, R. A. (2006). Does object naming aid 12-month-olds' formation of novel object categories?. First Language, 26(4), 347-361.

Fulkerson, A. L., & Waxman, S. R. (2007). Words (but not tones) facilitate object categorization: Evidence from 6-and 12-month-olds. Cognition, 105(1), 218-228.

Perszyk, D. R., Ferguson, B., & Waxman, S. R. (2018). Maturation constrains the effect of exposure in linking language and thought: evidence from healthy preterm infants. Developmental science, 21(2), e12522.

Robinson, C. W., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2007). Linguistic labels and categorization in infancy: do labels facilitate or hinder?. Infancy, 11(3), 233-253.

Waxman, S. R. (1999). Specifying the scope of 13-month-olds' expectations for novel words. Cognition, 70(3), B35-B50.

Waxman, S. R., & Booth, A. E. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: Fourteen-month-olds' interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Cognitive psychology, 43(3), 217-242.

Waxman, S., & Booth, A. (2003). The origins and evolution of links between word learning and conceptual organization: new evidence from 11-month-olds.Developmental Science, 6(2), 128-135.

Waxman, S. R., & Braun, I. (2005). Consistent (but not variable) names as invitations to form object categories: new evidence from 12-month-old infants.Cognition, 95(3), B59-B68.

Previous research suggests that labels support the formation of novel categories in young children. This meta-analysis includes studies exploring this question that use a paradigm similar to Balaban and Waxman (1997), resulting in a selection of experiments using behavioral methods on infants 3 to 18 months.

Search strategy: "We conducted a forward search based on Balaban and Waxman (1997) in Google Scholar and Web of Science (October 2015). This was supplemented with papers identified through citations and publication lists on lab websites. The final sample included only peer-reviewed publications."

Systematic: no